DERELIKT Vertex Color Lighting: How Hand-Painted Light Rebuilds the PS1 Look

Plenty of retro shooters chase the PlayStation 1 look with a CRT filter and stop there. DERELIKT vertex color lighting takes the harder route: illumination is hand-painted straight into the geometry, so surfaces carry their own light instead of waiting on a real-time lamp. Understanding DERELIKT vertex color lighting is the fastest way to read what this short narrative FPS is actually doing — and why its PS1 homage looks like craft rather than a nostalgia overlay.

What DERELIKT Vertex Color Lighting Means in Practice

A modern renderer asks a light where it sits and shades every pixel it touches, every frame. Vertex color lighting reverses that order. Each vertex of a mesh stores a color value, and the shader folds that value into the surface, so brightness is authored once in a 3D tool and travels with the geometry itself.

On the project's itch.io page, DERELIKT vertex color lighting is described as hand-painted vertex color used to simulate lighting. It appears as one of four named visual features, alongside affine texture warping, dithering, and animated textures.

Why go to that trouble? Because the PlayStation 1 had no per-pixel lighting hardware. Illumination in that era was largely baked into textures, vertex data, or both. If a corridor needed a warm pool of lamplight or a cold rim along a surface, an artist painted it by hand. For reference only, the older itch.io setting account describes ancient bone, while newer official PlayStation material describes an anomalous asteroid; the lighting technique itself does not depend on either substrate account. Reproducing the look faithfully means reproducing the labor, not just the artifacts.

Why Baked Light Sells the PS1 Aesthetic

Hand-painted light behaves differently from computed light, and those differences are exactly what your eye recognizes. Baked illumination does not slide across a surface when the camera moves, it produces no specular hits, and it casts no real shadows. What you get instead is flat, painterly falloff — soft gradients that read as era-correct because they were never physically simulated in the first place.

That also changes which texture cues dominate. When lighting is locked into the mesh, dithering and low-resolution textures carry most of the visual information. The eye stops reading highlights and starts reading patterns, which is precisely how PS1-era horror games communicated dread.

The same page confirms the project began as research into recreating the PS1 look before growing into a full game, so the technique is not decoration bolted onto a shooter — it is the origin point of the whole project.

The Supporting Tricks Around Hand-Painted Light

Vertex color lighting does not work alone. Three other techniques on the feature list reinforce it:

• Affine texture warping. PS1 hardware mapped textures without perspective correction, which made polygons appear to swim and wobble as the camera moved. Emulating that faithfully means deliberately breaking the perspective-correct mapping modern engines give you for free.
• Dithering. With limited color depth, gradients band into visible steps. Ordered dither patterns break up those bands, and combined with baked vertex light they produce the stippled, grainy falloff that defines the era's look.
• Animated textures. Flipbook textures create flickering screens, monitors, and light sources without any runtime light object. This pairs naturally with baked illumination, since both are authored upfront and cost nothing per frame.

Together, the four features describe a closed system: light that never moves, textures that warp, and color that stipples. Change one and the illusion weakens.

Community Notes on the Pipeline

The comment thread beneath the itch.io page is worth reading carefully, because it mixes useful leads with speculation. One commenter recalls the developer publicly asking about animating vertex colors and suggests an external DCC workflow for baking per-frame color data. Others describe a Blender-to-Unity toolchain.

Those are player experience and community reports about process — not statements published on the project page. The page itself does not document a rendering pipeline, so treat any specific tool claim as a lead to verify rather than a spec.

Several commenters across the thread also report that the project secured a publisher and moved to full-time development. Again, that is community reporting. The thread displays relative timestamps rather than calendar dates, so it cannot be pinned to a precise moment.

Status and Ratings: Dated Snapshots

Every number below reflects one page capture, not a live value.

The 5.0 score is a single rating, so it reflects one player's opinion rather than a consensus — read it as a mood signal, not a quality verdict. For release information, the official DERELIKT Steam store page is the listing to watch, since the itch.io page carries no launch date.

How to Judge the Look in Footage

When a new trailer drops, a few quick checks tell you whether DERELIKT vertex color lighting is doing the work:

• Strap and watch the shadows. If pools of light stay welded to walls while the camera slides, the light is baked. If they crawl and re-shade, something dynamic is running.
• Look into dark gradients. Zoom in on a shadowed corner. A visible dither pattern means the color pipeline is deliberately constrained.
• Check large floors and walls. Affine warping shows up most on big polygons near the camera, where textures visibly swim.
• Track flicker sources. Screens and lamps that pulse without a matching light object point to animated textures doing the work.
• Compare frame to frame. Baked lighting is static by definition, so two screenshots of the same room should shade identically regardless of where the player stands.

These checks also help you separate genuine technical homage from a post-process filter, which is the most common shortcut in the retro-shooter space.

Why This Matters Beyond One Game

DERELIKT vertex color lighting sits at the center of a small but telling design argument: retro visuals are a production method, not a color grade. A filter can make an image look old. It cannot make geometry carry light the way 1990s hardware forced artists to. The itch.io page frames the project as research first and game second, and the listed features read like the results of that research — each one a constraint accepted on purpose.

For anyone building their own PS1-style project, the takeaway is practical: author your light into the mesh, accept that it will never move, and then let dithering, warping, and animated textures finish the job.

FAQ

What exactly is DERELIKT vertex color lighting? It is the project's approach of painting illumination into mesh vertex colors so light is baked into geometry rather than computed per pixel. The itch.io page lists hand-painted vertex color used to simulate lighting as one of four core visual features.

Is DERELIKT released? As of 2026-11-10, the itch.io project page listed the game as in development. The official Steam listing for DERELIKT lists November 13, 2026; check it for the live status.

Does the game also use real-time lights? The supplied material does not say. The page documents hand-painted vertex colors as the lighting simulation method but does not specify whether any dynamic lights are layered on top, so treat claims either way as unverified.

Why not just apply a retro post-process filter? Because a filter changes the final image, not how surfaces are lit. Hand-painted vertex colors alter the geometry's own shading, which is what produces the static, painterly falloff that PS1-era horror games relied on.

Where can I follow development? The Visuwyg itch.io page for DERELIKT hosts the project listing and comment thread. Note that the thread shows relative timestamps and mixes developer replies with community reports, so verify specifics before relying on them.